vividreports: Truman Capote

We watched a movie a couple of nights ago - here at home, an old DVD that Ellen picked up last month for $1 at the Bartlett Public Library - a movie titled Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was released in 2005. It is a very compelling movie about Truman Capote's experience of writing the book that is considered his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. He is thought to have created a new genre in that book, the "non-fiction novel," which is, of course, an oxymoron. He wrote a novel, but it was based on real events and real people. He had seen a news article in the New York Times about a horrific crime committed in Kansas, in which four members of a isolated farm family were found dead in their house. The murders were committed by two men who had presumably gone to the house on the basis of a rumor that a large sum of money was there. They never found a large sum of money. Capote was intrigued by the case and decided to go to Kansas, learn as much as he could about all the people involved in it - the victims, the perpetrators, the police, the community - and write about it. He devoted 4-5 years of his life to the book. He became emotionally involved with Perry Smith, one of the perpetrators, who was on death row. He worked to help Perry appeal the death sentence, but ultimately the appeal failed and Capote witnessed Perry's execution by hanging, a scene that is included in the film. After the executions, he is able to complete the book, and when it is published, it is a sensation, but Capote pays a huge personal price for his success. The whole experience devastates him, and he is not able to write another book. The publication of In Cold Blood, turns out to be both the apex of his career and the beginning of a downward slide in which he loses control of his life, abuses alcohol and drugs and dies. One is left to speculate about what was really going on inside of him. What did the whole experience really mean to him? And perhaps most pointedly - was he unable to live with the possibility that he had manipulated Perry Smith, "used" him, to further his own career? Seeing the movie reminded me that I had at one time owned a biography of Truman Capote, who, as I have mentioned in this blog before, is actually a blood relative of mine. Truman Capote was born Truman Strekfus Persons. My paternal grandmother was Leola Persons. He is my cousin, six times removed, I think: i.e., my grandmother's g.g.g.g. grandfather was a brother to Truman Persons' g.g.g.g. grandfather, or something like that. His mother divorced Truman's father, Arch Persons, and married Jose Capote, a Cuban, who adopted Truman and renamed him. I wondered if I might still have that biography somewhere. I had not actually read it (or if I had, I had completely forgotten it) and I turned to an archival record of my library that is on my old MacBook Pro laptop. Sure enough - it was in Box #6. I found box #6, and there it was! So now I can read it - I actually started reading it last night while some clothes were in the drier, and got pulled right into it. Capote also wrote a memoir titled A Christmas Memory, which I read aloud every year in the pre-Christmas season when Ellen is baking fruit cakes to give to friends and family. It is a lovely, quite touching portrait of a beloved older relative whom he called "Sook," that Truman lived with for a time in Alabama, when he was just a young boy, who also bakes fruit cakes every year to give away. That the same author could write both A Christmas Memory and In Cold Blood makes it pretty clear that Capote was a complicated figure. He was infamous for his efforts devoted to self-promotion. One of his earlier works, Other Voices, Other Rooms, also about his early life in Alabama, featured a photographic portrait of him which provoked a lot of controversy. He disclaimed any responsibility for it - it was all the publisher's doing, he said - but he had in fact engineered the whole thing.